


Death of the Moth

by dirtybinary



Category: The Magpie Ballads - Vale Aida
Genre: Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-10 00:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13492941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: Savonn is almost eighteen, and his daemon has yet to settle.





	Death of the Moth

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

The stranger’s daemon is a fox.

She is the most beautiful creature Savonn has ever seen, her coat the same russet-red as her human’s hair, shading to berry-brown at the legs and the tip of the tail. She twines like a comma around the man’s ankles, sleek, powerful, built for the kill. The moment she and Dodona spot each other across the smoky tavern room, Savonn feels it, too, a crackle of static in the air before a storm.

“See something pretty?” he asks.

Dodona flutters her iridescent moth-wings. The man is watching them both, and so is the fox, her beady eyes reflecting the lamplight like twin fireflies. “Maybe.”

  
  
  


Savonn is almost eighteen, and his daemon has yet to settle. Most people fail to notice this till the third or fourth or fifth time they meet him, because they also fail to notice that they are meeting the same person every time.

There are worse problems to have. Josit’s daemon is a dolphin, and so she is tied forever to the river, that ancient seam of scar tissue separating Cassarah from Daliss. Rendell’s daughter wanted to be a spy when she grew up, but to be accompanied everywhere by a wolfhound the size of a small racehorse does not allow for very much subtlety. Much the same might have been said of Dodona in Savonn’s childhood, which she spent turning into one bizarre thing after another: a giraffe, patiently colliding with every lintel and chandelier in the Safin manor; an elephant, typically in the middle of crowded rooms; a lamprey, a bush viper, a limpet. These days, though, she prefers to be small and winged. If she does not settle on the moth, Savonn thinks, it will be the sparrow or the hummingbird—something innocuous, at any rate. They want to be able to disappear anywhere.

“You still change,” says Gladia accusingly, when Savonn goes to dinner at Rendell’s over winter leave that year. Gladia is a large beige rabbit with a cottonflower tail and ears that flop all the way down to her paws. She has just settled, and is very proud of herself. Rendell’s son, the bright-eyed crocus of a boy who belongs to Gladia, adds, “You’re grown-up. I’m thirteen and  _ my _ daemon’s stopped changing.”

Dodona puffs up her plumage in affront. “Heaven forfend,” she says, “that I have been anything other than a crow since we got to this godforsaken city.”

It is a game she plays, where she goes as long as she can bear without changing and tries to fool people into thinking she’s settled. That she plays it primarily in Cassarah, under the watchful eyes of Josit and the Governor, is surely a coincidence. “You have,” Gladia insists, her nose twitching. “You didn’t have those white markings on your wings yesterday.”

Dodona plunges out of her skin with a sharp caw of exasperation. She turns into a gadfly and buzzes straight for Gladia, who flicks her long ears in alarm; then a whirling blur of winged shapes, pigeon, bat, peahen, swan, until at last Dodona emerges as a seagull and flies screaming into the rafters. Savonn laughs, though it isn't funny, not really. “Damn,” he says. “Didn’t even make it to a week this time.”

Emaris stares at him in open fascination. “What’s the matter with you?”

Nothing, Savonn thinks; nothing _now_. But when Dodona holds a single form for that long he feels like he’s trapped inside a shirt on fire, unable to take it off. “She’s moulting,” he says, and blows a stray lock of golden hair out of Emaris’s face.

  
  
  


“I was a bird before,” says the fox, quite casually. “I thought I might stay one forever.”

She coils herself like a smouldering coal on the edge of the spinet, the spinet that Savonn is playing and Dodona is watching him play. The red-haired man rests his elbows on the lid of the soundboard and watches, too. The dance floor is crowded; no one takes any notice. “Why didn’t you?” asks Dodona.

She is a moth again tonight, resting like a topaz pin in Savonn’s curls. She is always a moth when they are out and about in Astorre. It is useful to approximate normality. “Too much space,” says the fox, her tail flicking back and forth to the music. “And we lived around cats.”

Savonn wonders what bird she was. He imagines a nightingale, or perhaps a shrike. The piece he is playing is a complicated ballad that requires a great deal of precision, but not so much that he cannot study the redhead at leisure across the keys, mapping out the contour of his clean-shaven cheek, the firesilk fall of his hair. “I don’t recognise the song,” says the man.

“It’s one of my own.”

“I like it. I would add a harmony, though.”

Red reaches down from the other side of the keyboard and picks out a high, tinkling riff in counterpoint to the melody. He is playing the spinet upside down, in perfect time, all the while not taking his eyes from Savonn. There is light and noise somewhere, there are couples spinning and revolving on the hinge of their music, but Savonn is aware of it only distantly, like a chick listening to the world through a crack in its eggshell. “Well,” Dodona is saying, “every daemon was a bird at some point, wasn’t it? Who doesn’t want to fly?”

“True,” says the fox. “You have been one quite recently, I think.”

Savonn loses his focus, and for a bar or two the harmony goes on alone. The fox sits back on her hind legs and curls her berry-dipped tail around her paws, an artist’s brushstroke of a movement. Dodona regards her in silence. They both enjoy pretty things, Savonn and his daemon. He knows she wants her, craves her, needs her with every stitch of her changeable soul. “Not more recently than last night,” Dodona says.

“What bird was it?”

The moth-wings flutter. “Forsooth! I don’t even know your name.”

Red glances at the fox. She is perfectly self-possessed, and does not look back. “Siwa,” she says.

A fraught hesitation. Savonn keeps playing, and makes no move to interrupt. “Dodona.”

“Don’t tell me what it was,” says Siwa the fox. “I should like it to be a surprise, when I find out.”

She flows from the spinet to the floor and stalks away without a sound. Red takes his fingers from the keys, a wisp of a smile ghosting on his lips. “Good night,” he says, so softly as to be nearly inaudible. Then he turns and follows Siwa from the dance hall.

For a minute neither Savonn nor Dodona says a word. Dodona flings herself to the floor by the pedals and transforms furiously out of sight, moth, owl, moth, finch, canary, moth again, so fast he can hardly distinguish the shapes as they come. “Foxes,” she says, her bright wings rustling like a rattlesnake. “Smug bastards, the lot of them.”

In a moment she has composed herself once more, and flits back up to sit broochlike on Savonn’s collar. He tears his attention from the door. “You should have been one,” he says.

  
  
  


“It’s the theatre,” he overhears Josit saying, late on his last night in Cassarah. He is in her riverside house, pretending to sleep, and his father is in the next room. “It does that to a person.”

Kedris laughs. “It’s his nature.”

“That, too,” says Josit. “His daemon will settle soon.”

“She’d better. I despise inconstancy.”

Dodona stirs in the hollow of Savonn’s collarbones, a hummingbird tonight, her anxious wingbeats syncopated to the rhythm of his pulse. “I only hope,” says Josit placidly, “it doesn’t turn out to be the moth. It never ends well for moths, you know.”

  
  
  


Dodona believes in dressing for the occasion. When they break into the house of the Saraian consul to steal papers for the Governor, she is a magpie; and so she is when the locked door of the study clicks open, and the consul comes in.

“Ah,” says Siwa. “I thought that might be it.”

As the shock dies away, they survey each other across the vast gulf of the desk and its secret papers: Red in a nightshirt, holding a lamp, the fox poised to pounce; Savonn with Dodona on his shoulder, reviewing the locations of all his knives, but not reaching for any of them. Dodona shifts her weight from one spindly foot to another. She was supposed to be keeping watch. “There are hundreds of birds,” she says, a trifle petulantly. “It could have been anything. What have you done with the gunpowder treaty?”

“Burned it,” says Siwa. “I know you, you see.”

She is not particularly large or fearsome. Dodona could change into something that is. They spend so much time around Iyone that she can, for instance, pull off a rather convincing lynx. But she does not, and so Red and Siwa see them as they are, two thieves in a dark house at midnight. “Do  _ you _ know me?” Savonn asks.

He is looking at Red. He is calm, because Dodona is. “We’ll see,” says Red.

He springs. Savonn’s first blade thuds into the wainscoting. The man moves like Siwa, or Siwa moves like him, a slash of scarlet, a blazing line of liquid grace. Savonn turns with him—it is less like fighting than sparring, less like sparring than dancing—and Dodona takes off from his shoulder in a cloud of black and white. He is still calm. Red will not kill him, no, this is a different sort of game and Savonn plays it well. He is near brimming out of his skin, hurling knives, dodging blows; he is in Dodona too, soaring, swooping, freefalling, staying just out of reach, as Siwa leaps from chair to table to shelf with her teeth bared.

When the jaws close, he feels it just as she does.

It does not hurt. It is a jolt to the heart, a breath of cold air, like being struck by lightning. They reel apart, all four of them. Red puts his back to the wall, tousled and wide-eyed. Dodona flurries up to the chandelier, tittering, leaving Siwa crouched in the middle of the room with a tuft of white feathers in her mouth. It is the first time Savonn has seen the fox look anything less than haughtily tranquil, and her human, too.

“Dodona,” he says, reproachful. She let this happen; she meant it to. “You are frightening our hosts.”

“I am not _frightened_ ,” says Siwa with great dignity, and that is a second shock, right there: a stranger’s daemon speaking to him. “I didn’t expect you to be so easily caught, is all.”

Dodona fluffs herself up among the unlit boughs of the chandelier, windswept and immensely pleased with herself. “Why chase me if you didn’t want to catch me?”

This stumps Siwa. She slinks over to Red without answering and curls into a sulky ball behind his legs. After a terse moment Red pushes himself off the wall, tosses back his hair, smooths down his nightshirt with a flick of his hand—reassembling himself piece by piece, a process Savonn understands, because he has done it so many times himself. When he speaks again his serenity has returned. “This once, I shall let you go.”

“Or perhaps,” says Savonn, “I am letting you stay?”

Red’s expression is indecipherable. But Siwa pokes her snout between her paws to peer up at Dodona, and there is no mistaking the hungry light in her eyes. She wants Dodona, too. Next time, Savonn thinks, the thrill of the touch still tingling through his blood, next time we shall steal you both.

“Fly away, my thief,” says Red at last. Warm-eyed, soft-voiced, a smile felt rather than seen. “Before I change my mind.”

  
  
  


“It felt rather nice, didn’t it?” asks Dodona, as the consulate disappears behind them. “It just takes some getting used to. Like the smell of myrrh.”

“Myrrh,” echoes Savonn, lost in thought. He wonders if he could get used to touching Red, to having Red touch him. “Yes, I suppose so.”

Ordinarily he would expect Dodona to have changed a dozen times by now—she is in high spirits, and the peahen would suit her, or the moth to ornament his hair—but the bird-weight of her on his shoulder feels so natural, they are back in their rooms before he notices what's strange about it. “You’re still a magpie.”

Dodona chirrups comfortably, already half asleep. “You’re still a thief,” she points out; and they both know, then, that she will never change again.

**Author's Note:**

> Some visuals: [Gladia](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com/post/151083077895/regal-rabbits-am-eat-dis-leef) | [Siwa](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com/post/169652843848/hellfireassault-this-may-be-the-most-beautiful) | [moth!Dodona](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com/post/170175364633) | [crow!Dodona](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com/post/143615832983) | [first date probably](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com/post/151470765050/fuchsspur-red-fox-vulpes-vulpes-and-magpie)
> 
> [enemyofrome on tumblr](http://enemyofrome.tumblr.com)


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